For starters:The game is littered with artificial difficulty and just plain bad choices.

The invader npcs feel tacked on and just there for sake of difficulty.

All enemies rotate around 360 degrees instantly and smack you, leaving little room for evades and backstabs, and instead you get smacked to death, and if you run they will all instantly chase you because they got group awareness and fight you 3 vs1 or 5 vs 1 in the most unfair way.Only reason its so bad, is because game is meant to be 1v1 and ds1 was perfect in that way.Also:Poison statues that shoot poison stagger you, and if you get staggered enemies can beat on you and win instantly because "thats totally fair.

I heard that the original game is easier, but the dlc adds extra enemies and all that artificial difficulty.

For items:I can get large titanite easier than small shards for some reason, because "That totally makes sense"

Enemies don't respawn,leading to having to join a covenant that increases damage by 50% and enemies have more hp, just in case you aren't a masochist enough.

The game completely misses the point of why ds1 was great.Ds1 balanced its difficulty to be hard but fair.Enemies had patterns some were weak to some stuff more than others, and even though there was some aritifical difficulty points in ds1 as well, it was far less than ds2.You could go and farm stuff for better armor at the beginning of the game no less in ds1 right at the start if you so wished, and you could stay level 10 forever if you wanted and beat the game.

Here:Items for sale are limited, and they don't start showing up till a lot later in unlimited source.So far i found a large titanite shards farm that always drops shards 100% and a place with 20% drop rate of small ones.Heck:If you wanted, you could go and get titanite chunks early in the game too if you wanted just by emptying the water in new londo ruins and going down and killing revenants if you so wished to level up, and chance for slabs.Thats what made ds1 so great.You also could easily buy spells of all types early on just at the very entrance for a price of course, and if you wandered into the right zone, you could buy most cleric spells pretty early in case you wanted to make a specific build.

Another thing i hated about ds2:The agility stat.You are forced to grind xp and put points into agility to be as fast in drinking and have same immunity frames in ds2 as ds1, and it forces you to grind.It was totally unecessary and limiting the playstyle.

There are more bosses for sure in ds2 than ds1 or so it seems, and lots of areas.dual wielding weaapons is a interesting combo as you can now have a dual wielding combo attack by holding triangle to make it so you can combo, but it has to be specific weapon types to combo with.

I think the biggest issue with backstabs, is most enemies cannot be backstabbed because they are giants who are immune to backstabs, or groups of enemies, and invincibility frames doesn't seem to save you.Right now i'm in the crypt which is far in the game i think.Not sure how far from the end i am.

I have mixed feelings about how you use branches of yore to get into areas.Its clever but you won't know where the best place is and they are hidden away.

So if you beat nashandra you get infinite titanite chunks apparently.The game's lack of drops early on of titanite and good spots till half game make it ridiculously hard to upgrade and you just end up with 1 weapon most of the time.Its kinda poor and i heard i had bad luck.

I also found out the school of the first sin added more enemies increasing the difficulty spike unecessarily in most areas, and that does decrease points.

Most bosses were too easy, but a few were only hard with massive difficulty spike because of massive hit boxes and ridiculous amounts of enemies, like the ruins sentinels which come in 3, and when they hit for half your life, it spells disaster for a game like this.

Gems which are used to regenerate health are ridiculously common too, making it too easy to heal on bosses.I do like the idea, but i wish most of these bosses could have more effort put into them.

The majority of enemies are huge knight guys, and there is a lack of variety.I will go back of course to ds2 and stream it today, so whomever wishes can find me on twitch under the name retrogamer5000.